The Dark Wild
by Scouse
Summary: Pitch BlackAlien crossover. Audrey Jackson is part of the crew of the ship the BaalHermon. Sent to transport a specific and familiar cargo back to Butcher's Bay no one knows what danger lies waiting for them...


Well, it's been a long time since I've written any Riddick fics and I know I never finished Furious Angels. I don't know what happened with that. I had it all planned out and then creativity and inspiration went down the pan. Up the swany. Figures, huh? Perhaps I shouldn't be starting a new fic but this idea has been bugging me a long time and I need a little rest from my Lost Quadrilogy. It really takes it out of me. So this one is for fun. I enjoyed penning this prologue and, if that feeling holds, I should slowly get this fic up and running. ;) It's jsut a bit of fun for me really so I've no idea how far I'm going to get or how regularly I'm going to be updating. If you know me from my other fics then you'll probably know I'm not really reliable for deadlines. XD

Anywho, I've always wanted to write a Pitch Black and Alien cross over. So now I've started one. Ignoring Chronicles of Riddick and it's events.

I hope you like this one and hopefully I can keep it going for a while at least. Maybe longer.

**Disclaimer**: I own neither Pitch Black nor Alien so don't sue me coz you'll get nothin'!

Happy Reading, I guess.

Gem

xxx

**The Dark Wild.**

**Prologue: Aboard the Baal-Hermon.**

Audrey Jackson had always hated going into cryo-sleep. The languidness that fell over them all as they sauntered about, winding down, getting themselves ready for their well-deserved rest. The lethargy. It always left her with the feeling that somehow they were edging closer to their deaths. It was like a heartbeat slowing and making it's final palpitations before it shuddered and ceased altogether. Like an ancient machine failing it's maker. Like they prey, writhing and struggling it's final remaining strength and life away locked in the jaws of it's captor.

She hated going into cryo…but it was part of her job and if she didn't do her job, she didn't get paid. If she didn't get paid, she was screwed and if she didn't do her job well, then she didn't get her bonus. She had bills to pay and people who she had to take care of. A little adopted niece back home in New Mecca. An adoptive father who's age and aching bones were beginning to get the better of him. She had responsibilities and she had to fulfil them whether she got paid that month or not. Time waited for no man and the Multiverse was a cruel place, so it was into the cryo-locker she went, misgivings or not.

Waking from the artificial slumber was a different matter altogether. That, she _loved_.

"Rise an' shine, Baby Bird!"

His voice always boomed to her, cutting through the veil of drug-induced, artificial sleep and waking her with a smile across her lips as she blinked her green eyes open to his image.

Rough around the edges was how he described himself. No longer a young engineer, fresh out of mech-college and with the Multiverse as his oyster. And yet too young to be considered an old hand at the job he was paid so little to do. He never complained however. He did his job, kept the ship running with a smile on his face, a spring in his step and a song in his voice, albeit a rather out of tune song, and more often than not it was all induced by the ample measure of whisky that he kept stocked and concealing in his coffee flask.

"Morning, Shirls." Jackson's voice echoed around inside her pod as she grinned up at him clamping the already half smoked stub of his cigarette in between his back molars and he popped her cryo-tube open, offering her a strong, thick-fingered hand, that was twice the size of her own, to help her out. "What happened to my breakfast in bed?"

Shirls snorted at her in response, sending thick bluish smoke out from between his teeth as he tugged her out of her pod and onto the cold metal grating of the floor of the cryo-locker chamber.

"Breakfast in bed my ass, Baby Bird!" he called back to her over thick, broad shoulders, clad in his standard oil smeared grey t-shirt, already halfway down the gangway towards the communal crew quarters. "You may be my lucky mascot an' all, but not even _you_ get _that _kinda preferential treatment, my girl!"

She laughed at his retreating back, letting the sound reverb through the stale air that had been recycled over their lengthy stint in deep space. No matter how hard the Company tried to fix it, no matter how many scientists they hired to run countless test, no matter how much money they threw at it (and that wasn't much considering how cheap-ass the Company were), they never were quite able to keep the air fed out from the recycler from smelling dank and old and…reused. Second hand air, Shirls called it.

"Jesus, keep a lid on it!" a growl demanded from behind her and she found herself taken by the shoulders and directed out of the way a little less carefully than she would have liked. He shot her a squinting, dark eyed glare over his shoulder, through tousled, jet black hair, tugging the collar of his pilot's jacket up about his neck and rubbing his hands together, attempting futilely to create some warmth between his icy palms. "Just coz you're wide awake and perky twenty four seven, don't mean everyone else is, Jackson."

She rolled her eyes at his customary gruff tone, at his hostility towards her, but her laughter subsided anyway, despite her raised hackles, as she fell into step behind the tall, ebony haired man, following him past the other four remaining engaged cryo-tubes. She had to bite her tongue and clench her fists tight by her sides to resist the urge to thump him right between his shoulder blades.

"You sure know how to ruin the moment, _Parks_." she muttered at the back of his head as they passed down the darkened walkway and into the following room. CCQ, Communal Crew Quarters, or so the Company liked to call them. In reality the room wasn't more than a brightly lit white box, with nowhere near enough room for the seven members of the ship's, the _Baal-Hermon's,_ crew to occupy all at once. Elbows were jostled even as just the three of them slipped into their usual seats about the hexagonal shaped table, settling down to await their other comrades' arrival.

Parks, the lanky, hawk eyed pilot of the _Baal-Hermon_, set to operating the antiquated food processor in the centre of the table, grimacing as it spat a parsimonious amount of synthi-oats out into the waiting bowl.

"You'd think the Company could at least standard-issue some _halfway_ decent synth-food for ships like us," he growled, straddling his stool two spaces from Jackson's left and tentatively prodding at the bland, coagulated, almost grey blob staring up at him from the bottom of his blue plastic basin. "I mean, it's not like they can do without us. We do the jobs no one else wants to. We do it on damn shit pay and we do it-"

"Without complaining, Nigel? Please. You complain about _having_ to complain for Christ's sake!"

The deep feminine voice, tainted with a wry amusement drew all of their gazes back to the door that they had processed through bare moments before.

She leaned against the doorjamb, cigarette already lit as Shirls' had been, managing somehow to Jackson's good humoured chagrin, to look immaculate even though she had just woken from their usual six month stint in cryo. She wasn't much taller than Jackson was, though she had a few more curves to add to the equation and she seemed to fill the room when she entered it. Commanding attention at the merest utterance that passed her scarred lips. Barbara Larsen, raven haired, hardened ex-marine, had been discharged from the service after, in her own words, she got a little too…_friendly_ with her commanding officer when his wife was away on business. And then said wife had found out, demanding that if he hadn't wanted a very messy, very _public_ divorce on his hands, he should give Larsen the boot, which he had. Immediately.

"Didn't do him no good, though." Larsen had laughed, deep in the back of her throat, upon relaying the tale to Jackson for the first time. "Old bitch still divorced him, dragged his name through the mud an' what have you. And the fuckin' cow made sure that I'd never work in the forces again…" she had snorted, taking a deep draw on her cigarette and blowing smoke rings to the veiwport of the _Baal-Hermon's _cockpit as they sat, feet kicked up onto their separate workstations as they enjoyed a brief moment of calm in their hectic job. "But, if things had gone down _different-like_, I wouldn'ta been here with you fine fuckers!"

"You're such a moaner, Nige." Larsen continued, sauntering to her designated seat to Jackson's left and effectively separating her from the complaining pilot.

"You'd know, wouldn't you, Baby?" he spat back but Larsen merely flipped him a lazy finger and turned her attention onto the other two occupants of the common room.

"Alright, Jackie-Babe?" she queried, fingers typing in her order for so called breakfast as she spoke. "Nice sleep? Lots of hot dreams for you?" she waggled her eyebrows suggestively and Jackson rolled her eyes, smothering a slightly embarrassed smirk. "I sure wish you'd let me treat you to a rent boy when we touch down," she curled an arm about Jackie's neck, turning her head to release a breath of scalding smoke in a dubious Parks' direction before laying her head on her shoulder and faking a sulk. "I'm a regular down in New Babylon. They know me by name…" she moved suddenly, tossing long black hair from one shoulder to the other and bringing her other arm up to link about Jackie's slim neck. "…and reputation."

Parks snorted back a laugh at that and Shirls, mouth full of food, leaned across the table and slapped Larsen's arms away from Jackie, making her draw back into her own space with a narrow-eyed, feline grin of amusement.

"Come on, Babe. I'll get you a good one…or how about I just take you to see a good old fashioned striptease? Huh? That take your fancy more, Chick?"

"Hey!" Shirls growled, swiping for her again and she stuck her tongue out at him, resting her weight forwards onto her elbows, smoke back at her scarred lips. "Quit corruptin' my lucky mascot, bitch!" his deep voice sounded indignant, thick with the glutinous mouthful he'd previously taken. "Jackie's not a whore like you are, _Barbara_!" Larsen barely batted an eyelid at his insult or the use of the first name that she wasn't particularly over fond of. "You're a good girl, aren't ya, Baby Bird?"

Drawn back into the conversation from where she had been content to sit back and observe the scene with a warm smile, Jackie raised her eyebrows inquiringly and sat forwards a little to input her own request for food.

"What was that, Shirls? Of _course_ I'm a good girl." she responded insinuatingly, sending Larsen off into peels of deep-throated laughter and drawing rolled eyes from Parks.

Shirls shook his short, cropped haired-head of blonde and dropped his spoon with a clicking of plastic hitting plastic, in favour of clamping his huge, oil-ingrained hands over his ears.

"I ain't listenin' to this!" he barked and Jackie joined Larsen's expulsion of hilarity, patting the heavyset engineer on a thick shoulder comfortingly.

Shirley Bauer had taken her under his wing from the get-go. A man of many words, many stories and only two emotions. Happy and happier. Larsen had told her that it was because he'd spent the best part of his childhood in and out of juvenile detention centres and he was just so grateful to be out of them. Stuck with an unfortunate name given to him by a mother who had been desperate for a girl and had gone mad after his father's death in the Great Mining Accident of 6094 on the New Chester Extraction Colony, Shirls had been bullied mercilessly from the start and he'd only had two possible options for dealing with all of the vicious attention he receive because of his mother's insanity. Fight or be fought. His size and stature were testaments to which he had chosen but no one, not even the all wise Larsen knew what had turned him around so drastically from the convict he had been becoming before he enrolled on an engineering course for the Company.

"Alright. Settle it people."

Jackie and Larsen stifled their laughs and offered a pair of relaxed salutes to the mousy haired man that entered the CCQ with a straight back and long stride, followed closely by the final two crew members of their ship.

"Lets have some sanity in here for half a click." Captain Nathan Lindy was a stern man most of the time, though he hadn't always been so and Jackie again knew this from the loose tongue of the only other female onboard their barely space worthy scrap heap. His wife had left him a long time ago, taking his only daughter with her never to be seen by his hazel eyes again no matter how hard he had fought in the courts or tried to track them down. Larsen admitted to not knowing the details, strange she knew, but Jackie had replied that it was alright. She felt a bit odd knowing his plight anyway. A little bit stiff and false. But he wasn't always so emotionless and she didn't always have to act as if she didn't know around him. Every so often, when he looked at her, she fancied that maybe he was seeing his daughter of long ago reflected in her features as he offered her a small smile or a pat on the head or maybe even a 'Good work, Jackson. Keep it up' on very rare occasions.

Shirls mumbled a 'sorry' beneath his breath and tucked back into his food and Parks was on his way back for seconds despite how sorely he had protested about the foods abysmal quality mere minutes ago.

"We ready to go down planet side, Cap?" Larsen queried following a hot jet of smoke blown out and down to the table as Lindy took to his own stool and dialled up a cup of coffee, skipping the synth-oats in favour of a caffeine kick. "I'm looking' forwards to a little downtime. A little r and r, if you know what I mean."

"Nearly." he replied after a gulp of the scalding fluid and he patted the head of the ship's dog, Kitten (a wiry haired grey mutt made from a mixture of questionable breeds), as she took her place beside him, hoping to catch a few leftovers when they had all finished. No doubt she would make a full circuit of the table, going from person to person begging for scraps, trying their luck with them all before the meal had finished. She was the sixth member of the crew, even though both Parks and Lindy protested at the others calling her such. Jackie and Larsen had picked her up a couple of jobs ago, when they'd been down on Hampstead Minor picking up a cargo that the Company wanted transporting to the very rim of the shipping lanes to a new colony sprung up there and in it's infancy. Kitten had been curled up beside the waste disposal units of the docks and after a few questions asked of the harbour master, they discovered that all her puppies had recently been killed in a pest extermination sweep, Jackie and Larsen hadn't been able to leave without her, no matter what the Captain had said. Kitten was going with them and she had taken to her life among the stars like a duck to water. It had been Larsen's idea to call the stray Kitten and she defended the name as being ironic and, therefore, cool.

"Shirls, when you're done here, I want you and Buck to go check out our situation with the engines, how their running. I know their due for a tune up soon and we need to get the required parts catalogued by the time we put down in New Babylon." Lindy stated resting his elbows upon the table and linking his fingers together about his plastic mug. Blue, matching the bowls and cutlery.

Shirls nodded his assent and glanced over to the doorway at the final member of their fellowship.

Bucky Young was a good looking kid. Blonde. Nineteen. Baby faced. Fresh out of the Company's engineers college and yet still under training. It was standard practice for all engineers to go for a year trial period in place of the usual final year exams before they received their full qualification as engineer. Sometimes the ships that the trainees were placed upon hired them fulltime after their examination year had been successfully completed. Some didn't. Some even failed in the first few months and got sent back to the Company College for re-education. But Bucky was proving himself useful so far, even if he was still under the delusion that the Mutliverse was ripe for the taking and the only thing that he needed to take him there was his dreams.

Jackie herself had been like that once, three years ago to be precise when she had joined the crew of the _Baal-Hermon _fresh out of New Mecca, fresh out of school and with a fresh communication officer qualification under her belt. First class no less and itching to see the stars. But she had learned things the hard way. Life was all hard work and hard treatment and they received little thanks and even less money for the jobs that they did transporting everything that the Company wanted them to from world to world, system to system. No questions asked. People were all bastards and bitches, set to better themselves and not caring if the shat on her on their way up the ladder. No silver-eyed rescuers to come to her rescue out in the real 'verse, though she did have Shirls and Larsen who had her back if she ever needed it so badly and that was more real to her than her childhood experiences what seemed a lifetime ago.

Bucky sat down to Larsen's left and Parks' right, grinning his gap toothed smile around them all as he gathered his own food enthusiastically. He never said much, but when he did it usually got a laugh from them all. Whether it was intentional, no one ever knew, but Bucky never really minded. He was a good humoured kid and Jackie liked him…which was more than could be said for the likes of Nigel Parks.

Larsen had never filled her in on Parks' background and Jackie had never felt particularly inclined to ask about it. All she knew was that the man disliked her. Not hate really. Just a mutual clashing of personalities that rubbed each other up the wrong way now and again, but they had learnt to deal with it and her adoptive father had always had the philosophy that no matter where she went in the Multiverse, there were always going to be people that disliked her, no matter how nice and polite and friendly she was to them. So she dealt. And she had learned to call the _Baal-Hermon _home, after three years, not including the time spent in cryo, walking it's innards and working it's brains. She'd learned to call the ragtag band that worked beside her and lived together with her, her family.

And Audrey Jackson smiled to herself, spooning her own breakfast into her mouth as she glanced around at them all and she felt the cold wet nose of Kitten as she nudged at her leg, hoping that Jackie was willing to be more free with her titbits than the others were.

-oOo-

The name 'Baal-Hermon' is biblical and means "possessor of destruction" or "of a thing cursed" so I found it quite fitting for the name of their ship and what's going to happen later in the storyline. 

Lemme know what you think after I've been away for so long. ;) Le sigh I missed all of the Riddick-ness.

Later.


End file.
